An environmental mystery is unfolding in south central Oregon. Lake Abert is drying up, killing everything that lives in it. Scientists are alarmed. A local business is suffering. But the state hasn’t done a thing about it.

Keith Kreuz dips a bucket into the mirrored cerulean waters of Lake Abert in the remote high desert of Oregon’s Outback. He pulls it up, studies it, then slowly tips the water out, looking for signs of life to spill over the bucket’s rim.

His wife, Lynn, stands near the family pickup, parked on gravel 30 feet from the water’s edge. Fifteen years ago, it would’ve been sitting in the lake.

“Keith, is there anything?” she calls out, hopeful. This lake has been her family’s livelihood for 35 years.

“No,” the 63-year-old replies, resignation in his voice. “Nothing.”

* * *

Lake Abert, a remote lake that was once 16 feet deep, is now just 2 feet deep. It has lost nearly 90 percent of its water in the last decade.

In years past, thousands of brine shrimp would’ve teemed in Kreuz’s big white bucket. The shrimp, just smaller than a penny, are among the only living things that tolerate Lake Abert’s severely salty water. Keith Kreuz has made brine shrimp his business, selling them as food to industrial shrimp farming outfits from Ecuador to Indonesia.

But Lake Abert is disappearing, killing the shrimp and leaving Kreuz without his main income. It’s an environmental mystery: A 64-square-mile lake is dying, and no one knows exactly why.

Worried scientists think area ranches and a state-funded fish restoration project may be responsible. They sought state help to study the lake, only to be turned away.

The scientists contend the isolated lake, 30 miles from the closest city, has been forgotten, or purposely ignored, by state officials hoping to avoid another fight like the decades-long conflict over scarce water two hours west in the Klamath Basin.

“To put it frankly, it’s water rights. It’s the fear that these state agencies are going to upset somebody,” says Ron Larson, a recently retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. “Whether it’s deliberate or not, it’s a tacit approval of the status quo.”

The saltwater lake has dropped to a low not seen since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, killing the brine shrimp, forcing migratory birds to find another stop and exposing the lakebed’s alkali dust, a pollution source, to the dry gusts that sweep through the Great Basin.

As the lake declines, the scientists fear that Lake Abert will completely dry up without anyone helping.

Lakes across southern Oregon are shrinking as drought grips the region. But the scientists say drought doesn’t explain what’s happening to Lake Abert, the Pacific Northwest’s largest saltwater lake. The snowpack that feeds it has only been slightly below average over the last decade.

The lake’s remaining water is turning ever saltier, too saline for even brine shrimp or a plentiful insect called an alkali fly. Without those key food sources, migratory birds have stopped coming. It’s unclear where they’ve gone instead. On a recent spring day, thousands of birds should’ve been at the lake. Just a few dozen were.

These photos from June 2012 (left) and June 2014 show just how far Lake Abert has dropped. (Courtesy Ron Larson)

For miles along the lake’s northern reaches, there was no water at all, just a white, salty nothingness. Lake Abert has dropped so low that gauges installed to measure its depth are stranded upland, 100 feet from the closest drop of water.

Seawater is roughly 3.5 percent salt. When Lake Abert was healthy, its water was between 2.5 percent and 10 percent salt.

This year, tests show that the lake’s water is as much as 25 percent salt. Imagine dumping 34 tablespoons of salt into a two-liter soda bottle.

Kreuz discovered the lake in 1979 as a fresh Oregon State graduate, then returned every summer, permits in hand, netting the tiny crustaceans by hand from a makeshift raft.

During good times, Kreuz grabbed as many as 50,000 pounds of brine shrimp a year, which he sold for $1.99 a pound. Last year, Kreuz was lucky to get 5,000 pounds.

This year, he doesn’t expect to find a single living shrimp. He’s visiting the East Coast instead, his first summer away from the lake since Jimmy Carter was president.

Kreuz doesn’t know when – or even if – he’ll be able to find shrimp again. Still, he says he’s more troubled about the lake’s long-term prognosis than his own.

“We’ve lost our livelihoods,” Kreuz says. “But it’s an ecosystem that’s been around for thousands of years that’s been lost.

“To me, that’s the real tragedy.”

* * *

(Courtesy Ron Larson)

To understand what could be happening to Lake Abert, it helps to understand where its water comes from.

It starts as snowfall in Fremont National Forest. Snow melts into the Chewaucan River, winds down through the town of Paisley, passes by ranches like J.R. Simplot’s ZX Ranch and ends at the lake. The Chewaucan is the lake’s major source. There is no outlet.

The river’s water is spoken for – and then some. Area ranches, which raise cattle, hay and alfalfa, have legal rights to draw more water out of the river than nature puts in each year. Ranchers depend on that water for their livings.

While nature created Lake Abert, mankind hasn’t memorialized its right to exist. The lake doesn’t have any legal right to the water that flows into it.

Still, for the last 70 years, enough water has gotten to Lake Abert to keep its ecosystem functioning, its shrimp and flies thriving. In big snow years, the system could meet ranchers’ needs and the lake’s. Lake Abert would inevitably sag in dry years, but it didn’t sink as low as it is today.

Lake Abert levels

Over the last decade, a nearby gauge shows snowpack has only been about 8 percent lower than normal. But Lake Abert has seen its volume shrink almost 90 percent. The shallow lake, once 16 feet deep, is now just 2 feet deep.

That worries the scientists. The group banded together last autumn as what they call the Lake Abert Council. Among those with Larson are Joe Eilers, a Bend hydrologist, and David Herbst, a biologist with University of California’s Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory. Herbst has studied the lake since he was a graduate student decades ago.

Even though Lake Abert’s levels fluctuate each year, they say what’s happening now isn’t natural.

“There was no reason for the lake to dry up the way it did,” Eilers says. “At this rate, it should be a puddle by August.”

Herbst says the changes are troubling. Brine shrimp can rebound with one good year. But he worries that they won’t ever get it if ranches are withdrawing more from the Chewaucan River.

“The lake shouldn’t be as low as it is right now,” Herbst says. “It’s not drought that’s doing this.”

Proving what’s responsible is a challenge.

While Herbst and Eilers know how much snow falls nearby (where its water starts) and the lake’s levels (where it ends), they don’t know what’s happening in between. Oregon doesn’t require private landowners to disclose how much water they pull from rivers.

Changes have happened on the Chewaucan, too. Without analyzing its potential impacts on Lake Abert, state and federal agencies funded a project on the river to allow native redband trout to move unimpeded through Paisley for the first time since the 1960s.

The $2 million project, finished in 2006, was constructed about the same time Lake Abert began declining. A concrete weir blocking fish migration was removed and new pipes replaced an old, unlined irrigation ditch. A pre-project federal study doesn’t say whether that allowed more water to be withdrawn.

Bill Aney, the U.S. Forest Service ranger who oversaw the study, said he didn’t think it examined that question.

“I don’t remember asking the team to consider whether it would increase the efficiency of the users to take their full allotments,” Aney said.

The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, a state agency charged with reversing the decades-long decline in Oregon’s native fish, was the project’s largest funder, giving $1.3 million. Greg Sieglitz, an OWEB manager, said the project may have increased withdrawals, but he didn’t believe it impacted the lake.

When Eilers, the Bend hydrologist, began trying to unravel the mystery of Lake Abert’s decline, he turned to the watershed agency for help, applying for a $128,000 grant to develop a water budget for the lake. He wanted to know how much water it needed each year to allow brine shrimp to survive.

His request was rejected. Eilers was perplexed by oversights. One team of reviewers said he didn’t have enough support for his proposal. Eilers had submitted several support letters, including one from the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, which said Eilers was asking important questions.

But the watershed agency didn’t forward them to reviewers, which then criticized Eilers’ lack of support. Sieglitz acknowledged the mistake, but said Eilers’ proposal had other flaws.

“It’s absolutely an important topic,” Sieglitz said. “It’s important to get a handle on. But the application wasn’t right for funding.”

The agency’s rejection letter urged Eilers to involve the Lake County Watershed Council, a nonprofit that includes local ranchers and landowners.

But Eilers is asking questions locals aren’t eager to see answered. Marci Schreder, the council’s coordinator, says she’s open to learning more about Eilers’ concerns, but worries ranchers would be hurt if more water has to go to Lake Abert.

“While we need to be environmentally aware, we also have to protect our ranching communities,” Schreder says. “We would definitely tread very carefully. My board is very nervous about this whole issue. It isn’t our role to get involved with something that could politically snowball.”

The scientists aren’t sure where to turn if the state won’t help them.

“I don’t think any of us would say we’re against irrigation or livestock grazing,” Herbst said. “But Lake Abert should be part of the equation, and it’s been left out.”

* * *

If more water was being withdrawn from the Chewaucan River each year, Brian Mayer figures he’d know. He’s the region’s watermaster, the Oregon Water Resources Department employee who oversees water use there.

Mayer says he hasn’t noticed any changes in years. “I think the same amount of land is being irrigated that ever was,” he says. If one ranch was using more, he says another would’ve complained.

But because Oregon doesn’t require ranches to track their use, he doesn’t have hard data, just anecdotal observation.

Upstream of local ranches, the Chewaucan River is more robust.

Mayer, like many ranchers around the region, blames drought for Lake Abert’s decline. He dismisses the scientists’ worries. He says he isn’t interested in seeing their data showing snowfall isn’t far below normal.

“I don’t have time to read it,” he says.

That sentiment typifies the reaction the scientists say they’ve gotten from state agencies. Trent Seager, a Ph.D. candidate at Oregon State who’s led bird counts at the lake for 20 years, remembers taking his concerns to a manager at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

At their first meeting, the manager was receptive, interested and worried, Seager says. Seager, another Lake Abert Council member, thought he’d finally broken through.

But by the second meeting, Seager says the official “went to essentially single-syllable answers.”

Seager remembers the manager telling him at one point: “It’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the politically right thing.”

Downstream of area ranches, the Chewaucan River is slower and more stagnant.

And what’s politically correct in an arid area where water rights are sacrosanct is complicated.

Joe Villagrana, manager of the J-Spear Ranch Co., which raises cattle and uses the Chewaucan for irrigation, says he fears the scientists are looking to take away ranchers’ water with “unfounded ideas.”

“We’re barely able to keep the water going to our fields,” Villagrana says. “There’s just no water.”

Villagrana says he wonders whether the scientists’ questions are a harbinger of a struggle over the Chewaucan. In the Klamath Basin, recent shortage led to a cut in the amount of water that ranches can use, as tribes asserted their water rights. “That’s our fear,” Villagrana says. “Without that water, we can’t survive.”

But there isn’t a fight yet, no battle lines drawn.

Solutions could be as easy as raising money to upgrade to more efficient irrigation equipment. Scientists say they want to understand what’s happening and what can be done to help the lake recover. Keith Kreuz and his wife do, too.

“This area is so off the radar,” Keith Kreuz says. “It’s on a road that leads to nowhere. No one goes past this place. And agencies haven’t put it on the map.”